Infant, Schoolboy, Lover, Soldier, Justice, Pantaloon, and Oblivion: “Soul of the Age” by Jonathan Bate Published 2009.
 
There are devotees of Wagner, Madre Teresa, and Cristiano Ronaldo; my fate has been Shakespeare.
 
“I like to think that Shakespeare would have adopted a similar procedure if he had been commissioned to write his own biography,” says Bate. Uhm…Really? Narcissism on Bate’s part? Maybe only someone with Bate’s background would be able to tackle a project of this magnitude. The “seven ages” approach allows Bate to make absorbing inferences about Shakespeare’s life, motives, and work, while being cognizant of the speculative nature of his endeavour.
 
This was one of the books that slipped through my fingers when it came out in 2009.
 
What did I love the most about Bate’s book? His ability to go on tangents, but not going too far off topic. His inclination to ramble needs to be balanced with editing, basically. His tendency is to go way too far … He loves the Proustian, circling sentence. But that’s this ability that makes it a joy to read him when it comes to writing about Shakespeare. One gets so immersed in this way of writing that sometimes it’s difficult to come out of it to breathe…His writing is not about soundbites, like much of writing about Shakespeare. Bate’s was able to throw light into the extraordinary effect that Shakespeare’s works have had on us and on other creative artists down the ages.
 
The rest of this review can be found elsewhere. ( )

There were times when I wanted to throw the book at Bates in frustration at his leaps of conjecture and conclusions without foundation. Yet, in between those moments, I enjoyed the book. At times Bates' admiration of Shakespeare bordered on bardoltry, though not to the same infuriating extent as Bloom's in his The Invention of the Human.

The Seven Ages of Man device was a bit artificial and, given the paucity of information we have about Shakespeare's life, there were times when Bates struggled to fill the parallel without straying too far from it.

Whether you are a Stratfordian, Oxfordian, Baconian or any other -ian, this book should be essential reading. It offers valuable primary evidence for William of Stratford's authorship of the Shakespeare canon, and supplements it with credible deductive (but not necessarily empiric) proofs.

All in all, it is one of the more comprehensive attempts at revealing how the life of the man is reflected in his plays - though there is a faint bitter aftertaste that if an author's life plays such a great role in shaping his or her work, what role is there for imagination? ( )

This jumped around too much for me. The information was all interesting and it was well researched, I prefer biographies that go in chronological order. This one started with his birth and then skipped around his adult years and back to his childhood and all through his years in London. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1291854.html

I read Bates' earlier book, The Genius of Shakespeare, at the end of last year, and very much enjoyed it; this didn't grab me quite as much, but is still very good, concentrating on what Shakespeare's works tell us about his environment - cultural, political and intellectual - rather than on the man and his legacy as in the earlier book. It is organised around the Seven Ages of Man speech, which gives a nice thematic progression. The chapters on the Essex rebellion of 1601, and on Shakespeare's education and philosophy, are particularly worth reading. (It is certainly a book where you can dip in and out for particular chapters.)

I was puzzled therefore by a couple of gaps in the story. There is a good discussion of astrology and astronomy (Shakespeare was clearly a sceptic of horoscopes), but no mention of witchcraft or other aspects of the supernatural, which is a pretty huge lacuna - from Joan La Pucelle and the sorcerous Duchess in Henry VI 1 and 2, to the deities performing in The Tempest, unearthly powers are never far away. The other area which struck me listening especially to the later plays (though perhaps it doesn't fit Bate's intellectual scheme) is Shakespeare's use of music, song and dance as an integral part of the play.

Still, a useful addition to the Shakespeare section of the bookshelf. ( )

DFYAA